Renovating

At home in a caboose

One of the best - and bravest - extreme snowboarders in the world, Jonaven Moore spent a decade turning a railway caboose into a stylish home. His caboose sits on his five-acre property in the Squamish Valley.

Photograph by: Andrew McCredie
, Vancouver Sun

Making tracks is something pro snowboarder Jonaven Moore knows all about, so it's fitting that the cabin in the woods he recently completed is on tracks.

Train tracks.

Moore has spent the past decade building his caboose house on a five-acre property in the Squamish Valley he bought with his mother when his snowboarding film career was just taking off.

His original plan when he bought the property from an old logger in 2002 was to put a trailer on it, but his mother suggested a caboose, recalling one a friend of hers had in Aspen, Colo. Sort of like a trailer, but with more character. What Moore didn't know at the time was that very caboose figured prominently in Aspen Extreme, that cheesy 1993 movie starring Paul Gross about two friends from Detroit who quit their jobs and become ski instructors in Aspen.

So there was a bit of serendipity, to be sure, with the idea.

Of course, once he'd settled on the idea, he had to find a caboose. No easy task.

"I approached BC Rail and was told that cabooses were pretty hard to come by as many small towns wanted them for tourist attractions," Moore says.

"Then he called me a week later and asked me how serious I was."

Turned out that a BC Rail caboose on active tracks in Prince George had caught fire and was going to be melted for scrap metal.

"So you're going to have to move quickly if you want it," Moore's BC Rail contact said, adding that he'd email over three photos of the burnt-out caboose.

"They were pretty dark and you could see all the windows were melted out," recalls Moore. "But it was a steel structure so it was still solid."

Optimistic by nature, Moore looked at the caboose as half full, figuring "the fire sort of helped me because I was going to have to gut the thing anyway."

So he bought the caboose for its weight in scrap steel, in addition to the trucks it would sit on and two lengths of train track to rest the steel wheels on.

"That was 70,000 pounds of steel in total, and back then it cost about $5,000 for everything," he says. "And I paid that again to move it here."

Which proved no easy task.

As the burnt-out caboose was on active tracks, BC Rail brought it to the Squamish yard for Moore for free.

But he had to move it from there, and with the help of a huge crane, some big trucks and some experienced movers, the tracks were laid and the caboose placed on them atop an elevated bed Moore built from rip rock to support the heavy steel structure.

And that's when the real work began.

"Being pretty young and naive - I was 22 at the time - I never really knew how much work it was going to be," he admits today. "The better part of the first two months were spent getting all the burnt stuff out of it. Then I sandblasted the entire shell and painted that."

As there were no services on property at the time, Moore had to put in a well and a septic field. He'd never done either before, but as he would soon discover, this project was to be all about doing and learning things he didn't know.

With no final architectural plan, the caboose house and massive deck structure sort of just grew organically, spurned on by Moore's unique imagination.

"It sort of just spoke to me in subtle little ways along the way. It would just make sense and grow in little ways."

He also enjoyed the kind assistance of many talented tradespeople.

"I was working for a builder in town at the time, and asking lots of questions, just learning as I went, really," Moore explains. "When I needed an electrician, I'd ask one of the electricians I was working with and they'd help me."

Apart from that outside advice and assistance, Moore designed and built almost every aspect of the unique home, including the wonderful interior of the caboose.

What was always part of his plan, which began with reclaiming a caboose that was destined for the scrap heap, was to use recycled materials whenever and wherever possible.

Much of the oak detailing inside came from the original floors from the caboose that survived the fire; the stained glass, bathroom slate and many other fixtures came from a large used building supply in Burnaby; and the cedar for wainscotting and cabinet door/drawer fronts came from an old cedar stump that was on the property when Moore bought it.

"Much of the deck is cedar that I took to a friend's mill when the trees where felled building the roads in my subdivision," Moore continues. "All the stone in the outdoor wood-fired oven was collected off the sides of logging roads in the local area, the main dining table is maple from a large branch that came down in the front yard, and the glass in the floor was all collected from the local bottle depot."

Other unique features Moore incorporated and built into the home design include: radiant heating run off a waterjacket in the wood stove; an on-demand gas-fired boiler; the entire caboose is insulated with spray foam making it an incredibly efficient space to heat free from the standard condensation problems inherent in a steel structure; and the entire deck area collects rainwater to be used in the garden areas. There are also both indoor and outdoor cooking facilities that both run off wood and gas.

In addition, the well pump on the property runs off solar power directly without batteries. The reservoir of water is held in a large cistern at the top of the property at elevation that allows gravity-fed water pressure to the caboose, and removes the need for batteries, as enough water is stored to last long periods until the sun returns to recharge it.

In terms of the design inside the caboose and on the outside deck, Moore was influenced by Japanese architecture.

"I've always liked that style and incorporation of indoor and outdoor living spaces," he notes. "I didn't mind having a small house - less to heat in the wintertime - but I wanted a big deck. So when it's nice out, you turn the deck into your living space."

Now that's it's completed, would he do it again?

"It took an extraordinary amount of work, and I'm not sure I would tackle it again," he admits. "I was lucky to have started it so young because I had a lot of energy. It could take up all my time."

And after all that time building it, he's not even living there now.

"I'm renting it out to great tenants who seem to really love it," he says. "It doesn't have to be me living here, as long as some is enjoying it. That's all that really matters."

So what's up next for Moore?

"I've got a job with two very old world craftsmen, each of whom have sailed across the Pacific in boats they have built by themselves," he explains.

The "job" is, in fact, one of the men's retirement project: Building a 58-foot double mast wooden sail boat based on the designs of famed navel architect John G. Alden.

"Over the years, he's bought up a lot of old shipwrights tools at auctions, including a band saw from the San Francisco shipyards that was in service before the Second World War," Moore says enthusiastically. "He's been collecting driftwood logs off the beach forever and they've built their own sawmill, so we'll mill every board for the ship.

"Man, it's really cool."

Moore expects this job to take up the next five years.

"This [caboose] has been really fun for me, I've learned so much along the way. I think I'm more capable than I was.

"And my new job is really fun because I walk in there each day and I feel like an absolute total novice. And I like that. I like learning new things."

WHO IS JONAVEN MOORE?

Jonaven Moore is one of the most accomplished snowboarders in Canada, if not the world.

Only instead of standing on World Cup and Olympic podiums, the 32-year old carved out his reputation by standing on some of the biggest mountains in the world. Then shredding them.

As such, he's not a household name, but Google "Jonaven Moore" and you'll find out how famous he is within the snowboarding world.

Born in Colorado, he moved to Banff when he was 12 and connected with Team Core, a crew of snowboarders who influenced a generation of riders.

In 1999, Moore moved to the West Coast to begin a wildly successful film career as a professional snowboarder. He quickly made a name for himself as the first rider to hit "Poppa Jordan" in the Whistler backcountry, a supersized version of the famed "Air Jordan" above Whistler's Peak Chair.

Many other firsts followed, particularly in Alaska, and he figured prominently in Absinthe Films' movie Lines, a documentary about big mountain snowboarding.

Working as a home builder when he wasn't on a film shoot, he recently moved to Vancouver Island to apprentice at a shipyard under a crew of master shipwrights.

He's working on his next major project: a 40-foot, steel-hulled sailboat that once refurbished, will take him around the world.

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One of the best - and bravest - extreme snowboarders in the world, Jonaven Moore spent a decade turning a railway caboose into a stylish home. His caboose sits on his five-acre property in the Squamish Valley.

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